The Road to Damascus (bolo)

by John Ringo

  Sar Gremian orders the federal troops stationed in Madison to clear a corridor of tightly secured airspace from the beleaguered spaceport to my overturned warhull and threatens mass executions of any federal unit that allows rebel antiaircraft missiles or artillery to open fire on that sled. The P-Squad commanders know Sar Gremian well enough to realize this is no idle threat. They must also know that Commodore Oroton will risk hell, itself, to take down that sled, since the cargo and technicians it carries spell repairs for me and death for his rebellion.

  When the lift sled is seven kilometers west of the escarpment, with its spectacular waterfall, P-Squad commanders report missile launches from positions north and south of Madison. Commodore Oroton has made his predicted move against the incoming lifter. P-Squad artillery batteries destroy the missiles with ease and launch an immediate counterstrike, claiming direct hits on both targets.

  The lifter holds course, coming in on final approach. It is less than one kilometer from the escarpment when a mobile Hellbore opens fire from behind Chenga Falls. The attack catches federal troops totally by surprise. The lifter’s pilot reacts far more swiftly, slewing the sled violently midair the instant the Hellbore powers up for the shot, which just misses one corner.

  The lifter’s auto-defenses fire a snap-shot response with infinite repeaters. Hyper-v missiles scream straight into the cliff face behind Chenga Falls. Explosions shake the bedrock with sufficient force to register on my sensors.

  “Direct hit,” the pilot reports. “Sorry about your waterfall. We took a big bite out of it. Got the damned Hellbore, though. Anybody care to explain how a bunch of terrorists got hold of Hellbores, for God’s sake?”

  Nobody answers. No further attempts are made against the sled, either, which enters the airspace over Madison and follows a direct route toward me at virtual rooftop level. At that altitude, the massive engines must be shattering windows along a half-kilometer-wide swath. At the very least, the lifter’s sheer bulk — great enough to accommodate my entire warhull — will serve as a psychological shock to the entire population of Madison, including the urban insurrectionists.

  An escort of aircars rises to meet the heavy lifter, including one that broadcasts Sar Gremian’s personal ID signal. The sled finally sets down twenty meters from my overturned warhull. The escorting governmental aircars land beside the nearest corner of the lifter, which dwarfs them into insignificance. The passengers and pilot aboard the sled disembark first. There are thirteen, counting the pilot.

  I cannot see them as anything but patterns of radiant heat against the cooler, darker colors comprising the ambient background. Sar Gremian — or someone wearing his wrist-comm — emerges from his aircar while others climb out of the remaining cars and spread out along my flank, creating a defensive line. These defenders carry objects that show as long, dark shadows against the heat of their bodies, shadows shaped like combat rifles. I conclude that they are the guards assigned to the repair team — or possibly to stand guard over me, while watching the repair team for potential sabotage.

  This precaution would be in keeping with Sar Gremian’s distrust of everything.

  One member of the repair team greets Sar Gremian with a droll observation. “Your rebels made a for-sure-enough mess of that machine, didn’t they? I’m Bhish Magada, chief weapons engineer, Shiva Labs,” he adds, approaching the thermal signature that corresponds with the ID transponder in Sar Gremian’s wrist-comm. “You’ll be Sar Gremian? Can’t say it’s a pleasure, but as long as you pay us, you’ll get your money’s worth.”

  “I’d damned well better,” he says with heavy, sullen threat in his voice. “It’s a long walk home for you and your people.”

  Having duly disposed of the obligatory threat and counterthreat, the team’s spokesman performs perfunctory introductions that include nothing but bare names and titles. Four are engineers. The other seven are technicians with various specialties, running the gamut from psychotronic calibrationists to master gunsmiths with Shiva’s armories.

  The sled’s pilot is not an official member of the repair crew, but he is on Shiva Weapons Lab’s payroll, according to Bhish Magada, who refers to him as a retired navy pilot looking for a second income. This explains his quick reaction time and level-headed response under fire, traits lamentably lacking in civilian pilots. I find myself wondering how many of Shiva’s employees are former combat veterans and what bearing — if any — this may have on my personal security.

  Sar Gremian, with a voice as distinctive as his fingerprints, addresses me with his usual abrupt growl. “Bolo, lock onto these thirteen ID signals. They’re your official repair team. They’re authorized to do whatever’s necessary to get you back into action.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  “Get busy, then,” he tells the engineers and technicians. The team begins the heavy job of off-loading crates and setting up a field-grade depot, beginning with prefab tool sheds and a prefab workshop from which they will conduct much of their exacting work. Sar Gremian stays just long enough to satisfy himself that they know what they are doing, then climbs into his aircar and leaves, heading back for the president’s palace and the urgent business of coping with an on-going rebellion.

  It takes the repair team three days just to run diagnostics. The process is slowed time and again by the P-Squad guards. Each and every step of the complex diagnostics is delayed by the security protocols, which are so unwieldy the technicians cannot flip a switch or push a button on their equipment without enduring a twenty-minute security interrogation on the use of said button or switch and a polygraph analysis of the answers, looking for stress variables that would indicate an untruthful answer. The resulting delays bring the repair process to a screeching halt.

  When Sar Gremian discovers that diagnostics are still underway, with no repairs even begun, he explodes.

  Bhish Magada cuts him off mid-tirade. “You want that machine fixed? Tell your goons to get off our backs and let us work. Those gorillas interrupt us every three seconds—”

  “They’re following orders! Oroton will stop at nothing to sabotage that Bolo. Security has to be tight. I suggest you cope.”

  Magada slams a reticulated servo clamp onto the desktop. “That’s it!” he snarls. “Get yourself another whipping boy, Gremian!”

  He emits a shrill whistle and shouts, “Hey! Ganetti! Pull the team out right now. Get ’em back to the hotel. I’ve had enough of these anal-retentive assholes.”

  Before Sar Gremian can respond, the Irate Bhish Magata kills the connection. He has literally hung up on Jefferson’s head of security. Twenty-three seconds later, Sar Gremian calls back.

  “All right, Mr. Magata, you’ve made your position clear. What do you need?”

  “Breathing room,” Magata says after a long, silent moment. “Those brainless baboons demand explanations for every single action we take, every piece of equipment we unpack, every tool we pick up. They want to know every single detail and then they demand to know why. When they don’t understand the answer — which they never do — they hold us at goddamned gunpoint until they’re satisfied. Since they don’t have enough brain cells between them to understand anything more complicated than ‘it’s broken and we’re trying to find out why,’ we end up spending most of the day trying to explain high-tech military science to a pack of trigger-happy morons who make bacteria look smart. Call them off or find yourself another repair team.”

  “You have no idea what my problems are—”

  “And I don’t give a crap about ’em, either. But you’d jolly well better start worrying about ours. Your security guards are keeping that Bolo out of action, not us. We could’ve finished the diagnostics and moved forward with repairs two days ago, if they’d just let us get on with it. So here we sit while your final invoice just keeps getting higher. You’ve already paid for those replacement parts and you’ve already paid advance rental fees for most of the equipment. But you’re paying us — engineers and technicians — by the hour, at
mandatory union rates. It’s your money to waste. You can spend it having us fix your Bolo or you can pony up the cash to pay for day after day talking to idiots who can’t add one plus one and come up with two. So make your decision. But don’t you dare snarl at me or my people for taking too long, when it’s your own stupid fault.”

  Sar Gremian spends three point five minutes cursing at the guards in barracks-room language strong enough to peel paint. He then orders them to stop delaying the repairs. The crew finally gets down to business. I begin to entertain hope that I may actually be restored to battle worthiness. Given the steadily worsening news reports and emergency calls from police units, there is very little time left in which I or anyone else will be able to act decisively enough to crush the rebellion.

  It would be a fine irony if Vittori Santorini spent twenty billion repairing me, only to find himself looking down the wrong end of Commodore Oroton’s gun barrel, before I am functional enough to prevent the rebellion from deposing him. I do not know, in my own flintsteel heart, whether I would feel chagrin or relief. It troubles me even more that the answer to that question has nearly ceased to matter. I do not like the job I am likely to be given, once repaired. Worse, I see no way to avoid it. So I wait in silent misery while the engineers begin their work.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I

  Yalena hadn’t seen Klameth Canyon since her childhood. She didn’t go anywhere near Maze Gap, not with three-quarters of the federal troops on Jefferson camped on the Adero floodplain, forming a blockade across the Gap. She flew nearly a hundred kilometers north from Madison, then turned in a one-eighty flip-flop to follow the long spine of the Damisi range south again. When she hit the first turbulence, she was very glad she’d become a fair bush pilot, on Vishnu, as part of her extreme camping training.

  “If you intend to fly into the middle of nowhere to spend time in rough country,” her instructor had said, echoing her father’s words almost verbatim, “then you will by God learn to fly under any and all weather conditions.”

  Phil Fabrizio, seated beside her in the two-person skimmer, spent much of the flight gripping the armrests on his seat and trying to pretend he wasn’t scared witless as she whipped them through the jagged teeth of the Damisi highlands, at altitudes nearly a thousand meters below the snow-torn peaks. The air currents were savage, but there was no radar net out here, leaving them invisible to everything except satellites. Yalena wasn’t too worried about those. The P-Squads had better — and easier — targets to shoot at than one small skimmer.

  “You sure you know what you’re doin’?” Phil asked as she navigated the obstacle course.

  “If I don’t,” she gave him a cheerful grin, “you’ll have plenty of time to bitch about it, while we try to hike out.”

  “Huh. More like, we’ll end up a thin smear on some piece a’ rock ain’t nobody else ever gonna lay eyes on.”

  “There is that,” she agreed cheerfully. “How about you be quiet and let me concentrate?”

  “You got it.”

  She hadn’t seen Phil Fabrizio much during the five days she’d been “home.” Her father had kept her busy, running courier jobs through Madison, hooking up with members of the urban resistance, getting the students who’d come with her into place as intelligence liaisons. She’d met the Bolo’s one-time mechanic just once, during a briefing her first night on Jefferson, and had only caught glimpses of him a couple of times, since, when both of them reported back to her father at their constantly shifting base of operations in Madison. Phil Fabrizio didn’t know that she was the daughter of Colonel Khrustinov, who was purportedly still on Vishnu, insofar as most of the urban guerillas knew.

  Phil didn’t even know her real name, since Yalena’s name was — or at one time had been — one of the best-known names on the whole planet. Everyone knew who “Yalena” was. And even though her father wasn’t using his real name and didn’t look anything like the man who had come to Jefferson more than two decades previously, neither Yalena nor her father would risk letting any of the locals know who either of them really was. So she was going by the name Lena, without using a last name at all.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Phil, by contrast, was something of a celebrity amongst the urban guerillas. They all seemed to know him and referred to him with a reverence that surprised her. He was one of their own, had worked as the Bolo’s mechanic and therefore knew how to help the commodore cripple it. Moreover, he’d gotten himself arrested and sent to a death camp, to try finding his nephew, and then he’d escaped that death camp, bringing his nephew and others safely home. Phil Fabrizio was a genuine war hero to the ragged, poverty-stricken urban masses, who were trying hard just to survive under POPPA’s iron-fisted hand.

  Phil was meeting with the commodore to hand-carry critical gear they had brought from Vishnu, along with a message of some kind from the leaders of the urban resistance. Those leaders’ prerebellion occupations had been directing organized crime in the seedier sections of Madison and Port Town and running the only surviving construction companies on Jefferson. They had built the lavish new homes occupied by POPPA’s elite and had demolished the unsightly slums that cluttered the view from their sumptuous windows. They were now poised to reverse the process — explosively — if “Commodore Oroton” agreed to an unknown set of terms.

  Whatever those were, Yalena’s father wanted her mother to hear the message in person from the man who’d met with them. So here they were, running the biggest blockade in the history of her homeworld, trying to reach Klameth Canyon Dam. Phil Fabrizio just didn’t know why Yalena had been chosen as his pilot. When they reached the spot marked on Yalena’s chart, she took them even lower, rattling their teeth with the turbulence, keeping them well below the elevation the besieging federal troops routinely swept with targeting radar.

  They reached Klameth Canyon country without drawing down artillery fire onto their heads, but the last few kilometers were fraught with tension. It dragged at their nerves and tightened their muscles against bone. The maze of canyons stretched away in a dark spidery web of deep slashes through the heart of the Damisi. The more distant slashes were blue with haze. Occasional flashes of light marked distant — and not-so-distant — explosions, where federal artillery barrages were battering the main canyon floor with long-range, high-angle fire.

  “They’re shellin’ th’ shit outta those canyons,” Phil muttered, breaking the tense silence. “It’s one thing t’ hear they’ve been dumpin’ artillery on top o’ those folks for five days. It’s worse, seein’ ’em do it.”

  Yalena just nodded. Her grip on the skimmer’s controls had turned her knuckles white. She’d never been shelled. Her imagination quailed, trying to visualize what it must be like to be caught under those shells, as they burst open and rained death down onto the heads of hapless civilians.

  Phil Fabrizio muttered, “Christ, I’m hopin’ the commodore says yes to what I gotta tell him.”

  Yalena knew more about that message than Phil suspected. Her father had given her the bare-bones outline, so that she could pass the word to the students who’d come home with her. They were in position, ready to move at a moment’s notice. The entire urban rebellion was poised to strike, in fact. Everything and everyone was in place. Once her mother had the gear they’d brought out here — and Phil Fabrizio’s message — Yalena’s father was going to turn Madison into a war zone the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Deng invasion.

  Only this time, her father’s Bolo wasn’t going to take part in it. He was still down for repairs, while the engineers and technicians tried to chase down the cause of his total blindness. Granted, they weren’t chasing it too hard…

  “There it is,” Phil said, pointing out the landing field. It was a handkerchief-sized natural meadow a hundred meters from the upper edge of Klameth Canyon Dam, which glittered in the late afternoon sunlight. Water poured across the lip of the spillway and plunged down the long, shining expanse of concrete, tur
ning the turbines that provided electrical power to the entire maze of canyons and the Adero floodplain beyond — including Madison. Beyond the dam lay the reason for her mother’s continued immunity from direct shelling. Klameth Reservoir lay like a sheet of molten silver in the hot sunlight, stretching back through the mountains in a basin that was nearly as large as the canyon system on the downhill side of the dam.

  “That’s a lot a fuckin’ water,” Phil muttered. “I never saw that much water, except at th’ ocean.”

  “I saw a lot of lakes on Vishnu,” Yalena said, “but never one that big. The commodore’s brilliant, isn’t he? Hiding inside the dam holding that back.”

  “Kid, you don’t know the half of it.”

  Yalena just grinned. Then they were below treetop level and the only things they could see were the patch of grass that formed the landing field and the forest surrounding it. She set them down gently, then rolled forward at a careful crawl, heading for the nearest gap beneath the trees. Commodore Oroton’s people had strung camouflage netting across the treetops, providing a snug and hidden place to park small aircars and skimmers. They found a space to squeeze into, then popped the hatches and crawled out. Their reception committee was already waiting.

  “Dinny!” Phil said with a delighted smile, shaking Dinny Ghamal’s hand — the one that wasn’t holding a battle rifle. “How’s it with you, today?”

  Dinny Ghamal gave the erstwhile Bolo mechanic a brief smile. “Can’t complain,” he allowed. “You’re looking better fed. You’ve succeeded, I take it?”

  “Close as we’re gonna get. It’ll be up t’ th’ commodore to say if I got enough of what he wanted, to go ahead with it. I got some gear, too.” Phil glanced at Yalena, who dutifully dug into the back of their skimmer, hauling out the heavy packs. While she was busy, Phil added, “That new officer that came in with them combat vets, I gotta tell you, he’s one sharp-witted shark. He’s already got the urban resistance organized an’ runnin’ better’n it has since it blew up its first bomb. I ain’t had a chance t’ meet him, yet, but I’m s’posed to see him tonight. I’m lookin’ forward t’ that, I can tell you.”